Editorial

The Neuroscience Peer Review Consortium

Clifford B Saper¹ , John HR Maunsell² and Terje Sagvolden³

¹  Journal of Comparative Neurology, Harvard Medical School, Boston, MA, USA

²  Journal of Neuroscience, Harvard Medical School, Boston, MA, USA

³  Behavioral and Brain Functions, University of Oslo, Oslo, Norway

author email corresponding author email

Behavioral and Brain Functions 2009, 5:4doi:10.1186/1744-9081-5-4

Published:	16 January 2009

Abstract

The Neuroscience Peer Review Consortium (NPRC) was conceived in the summer of 2007 at a meeting of editors and publishers of neuroscience journals. One of the working groups addressed whether it was possible to construct a system for permitting authors whose manuscript received supportive reviews at one journal but was not accepted to send a revised manuscript together with its first round of reviews to a new journal for the second round. This would speed up the review process and reduce the work for reviewers and editors. The working group not only designed a framework for transferring reviews among journals, but also implemented it as the NPRC. By the fall of 2007, more than a dozen major journals had signed onto the NPRC, sufficient to launch the experiment in January, 2008. We invite authors who have not yet used the NPRC to try this method for appropriate manuscripts.

In order to encourage dissemination of the details outlined in this Editorial, it will also be published in other journals in the Neuroscience Peer Review Consortium.